Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art’s dialectical and evolving relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated discussions on art’s role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods. Since the 1980s, art and artists’ roles in gentrification have been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts, the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban spaces illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city not only allows uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, cultural studies, human geography, social anthropology, and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers. Tijen Tunalı is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Research Fellow at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) Aarhus University, Denmark. Cover image: Exterior view of the Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin, a derelict building which housed a contemporary art squat and became a casualty of gentrification in 2012. Image courtesy of www.freeimages.co.uk. Routledge Research in Art and Politics Routledge Research in Art and Politics is a new series focusing on politics and government as examined by scholars working in the fields of art history and visual studies. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. Migration, Diversity and the Arts The Postmigrant Condition Moritz Schramm, Sten Pultz Moslund and Anne Ring Petersen Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times The Revolution Will Be Live Kristina Olson and Erec J. Schruers Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art Marta Filipová Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism Anthony White WPA Posters in an Aesthetic, Social, and Political Context A New Deal for Design Cory Pillen The Political Portrait Leadership, Image and Power Edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis Aesthetic Resilience Edited by Eliza Steinbock, Bram Ieven, and Marijke de Valck Terrorism and the Arts Practices and Critiques in Contemporary Cultural Production Edited by Jonathan Harris Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape Edited by Tijen Tunali For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-Art-and-Politics/book-series/RRAP Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape Edited by Tijen Tunalı First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Tijen Tunalı to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tunali, Tijen, editor. Title: Art and gentrification in the changing neoliberal landscape / edited by Tijen Tunali. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020054570 (print) | LCCN 2020054571 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367521479 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003056720 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art and cities. | Gentrification. | Neoliberalism‐‐Social aspects. Classification: LCC N72.C58 A785 2021 (print) | LCC N72.C58 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03‐‐dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054570 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054571 ISBN: 978-0-367-52147-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-52149-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05672-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments About the Editor List of Contributors Introduction: The Dialectic Role of Art in Late Neoliberal Urbanism vii ix x xi 1 TIJE N TUNAL I PART I Art’s Conflicting Relationship to Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century 1 Gentrification and the Critique of the Contemporary Urban Dream-World 19 21 L UKE CARRO L L 2 Proximal Disruptions: Artists, Arts-Led Urban Regeneration and Gentrification in Oakland, California 39 ROB IN B AL L I G E R 3 Arts, Culture and Neoliberalism: Instrumentalization and Resistance in the Case of Marseille 57 M ATHIL DE VIG N A U A N D A L E X A N D R E G R O NDEAU PART II Alternative Voices, Visualities and Performances Against Gentrification 4 A Listening Against Gentrification: Ultra-Red in Boyle Heights and Elephant & Castle S US ANA JIM E N E Z - C A R M O N A 75 77 vi Contents 5 Representing the Anti-Gentrification Resistance: The Role of Two Artists in a Retail Market in London 91 M ARIE -PIE R R E VI N C E N T 6 Enacting the “Right to the Creative City” in Berlin 108 RAB E A B E RF E L D E PART III Community Building in the Gentrified Urban Space 7 The Urban Art Mapping Project: Mapping Art, Narrative and Community in St. Paul, Minnesota 125 127 HE ATHE R SHI R E Y , D A VI D TO D D L A W R E N CE, AND PAUL LORAH 8 Indigenous Cultural Resurgence, Hotel Murals and Neocolonial Urbanism 140 MICHE L L E VE I TC H 9 “Mapping the Old City”: Street Art, Urban Resistance and Community Building in Nicosia, Cyprus, 2014–2018 162 PANOS L E VE N TI S Index 176 Figures 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 The aestheticization of labor, 2019. Photograph. Shoreditch. ©Luke Carroll Disinvestment at 32nd Street and San Pablo Ave., West Oakland. March 8, 2016. Photograph: Robin Balliger Still image from “The Guillotine” music video by The Coup, 2012 “Each 1 Teach 1” live style writing at First Friday. March 1, 2013. Photograph: Robin Balliger Protesting factory farms at First Friday, Oakland. May 3, 2019. Photograph: Robin Balliger Location of the four study cases analyzed in Marseille, 2020. ©Mathilde Vignau Example of Graffiti in Le Panier, 2016. Marseille. ©Mathilde Vignau Example of frescos in Le Panier, 2016. Marseille. ©Mathilde Vignau Using street art to denounce the “high treason” of the municipality in La Plaine, 2016. Marseille. ©Mathilde Vignau Future Hackney. Untitled, 2019. Photograph. Ridley Road Market. ©Donna Travis Support Black Businesses. Untitled, 2019. Photograph. Ridley Road Market. ©Donna Travis Future Hackney. Hands off, 2019. Photograph. Ridley Road Market. ©Donna Travis Martin Baier, Doch Kunst (Yet Art), 2017 Our study area is located in the Midway Neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. (a) Minnesota is part of the “North Coast” bordering both Canada and Lake Superior. (b) The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are located at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. (c) The Midway Neighborhood is often overlooked—it developed later than the downtown cores and is often seen as an area to pass through. (d) The heat map displays urban development patterns as of 1900, depicting the neighborhood’s central location, as well as its peripheral role. ©Paul Lorah Lori Greene, Berbere, 2015. Mosaic. St. Paul, Minnesota. ©Lori Greene Greta McLain, Braided, Acrylic on poly tab canvas on brick; mosaic. 2015. St. Paul, Minnesota. ©Greta McLain 31 43 47 50 52 60 66 67 69 93 99 100 118 128 134 135 viii Figures 8.1 Jerry Whitehead (Plains Cree), Richard Tetrault, Eric Parnell (Haida), Richard Shorty (Northern Tutchone), Haisla Collins (Tsimshian, Celtic), Sharifah Marsden (Anishinaabe) and Nicola Campbell (Interior Salish, Métis), Through the Eye of the Raven, 2010. Wall mural, Orwell Hotel, Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. Video still from Through the Eye of the Raven (2010), produced by Vancouver Native Housing Society and Joseph MacLean/Numedia Group. ©Dave Eddy, Orwell Hotel and Vancouver Native Housing Society 8.2 Jerry Whitehead (Plains Cree), Richard Tetrault, Eric Parnell (Haida), Richard Shorty (Northern Tutchone), Haisla Collins (Tsimshian, Celtic), Sharifah Marsden (Anishinaabe) and Nicola Campbell (Interior Salish, Métis), Through the Eye of the Raven, 2010. Wall mural, Orwell Hotel, Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. Video still from Through the Eye of the Raven (2010), produced by Vancouver Native Housing Society and Joseph MacLean/Numedia Group. ©Dave Eddy, Orwell Hotel and Vancouver Native Housing Society 8.3 Jerry Whitehead (Plains Cree) and Portico Design, Forest Spirits Suite (Room 508), 2013. Skwachàys Lodge and Residence, Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. Photographer Craig Minielly/Aura Photographics. ©Craig Minielly, Dave Eddy, Skwachàys Lodge and Vancouver Native Housing Society 8.4 Jerry Whitehead (Plains Cree), Nancy A. Luis (Cree, Iroquois, Métis) and Portico Design, Northern Light Suite (Room 609), 2013. Skwachàys Lodge and Residence, Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. Photographer Craig Minielly/Aura Photographics. ©Craig Minielly, Dave Eddy, Skwachàys Lodge and Vancouver Native Housing Society 9.1 Locations of “Mapping the Old City” works in Walled Nicosia. ©Panos Leventis 9.2 The 15 works of “Mapping the Old City” numbered chronologically and grouped in three geographic clusters. ©Panos Leventis 9.3 “Mapping the Old City” work #1, Aristophanous Street, April 2014. ©Panos Leventis 9.4 “Mapping the Old City” work #4, Trikoupi Street, August 2016. ©Panos Leventis 9.5 “Mapping the Old City” work #2, Achilleos Street, April 2016. ©Panos Leventis 149 150 155 156 164 166 168 169 171 Acknowledgments This book project emerged from two academic gatherings. One is the panel I organized at Art History Association’s (AHH) annual meeting “Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape” on April 4–6, 2019, in Brighton, UK. I am grateful to the presenters Luke Caroll, Amy Melia, Michelle Veitch, Marlous Van Boldrik, Justin Burns, Nicola Guy, Bill Balaskas and Kirsten Lloyd who, with their rigorous input and challenging discussions, inspired me to produce this book. The other conference, which enabled me to be exposed to the works of the authors Mathilde Vignau, Marie-Pierre Vincent, David Todd Lawrence, Paul Lorah, Heather Shirey and Panos Leventis, was “Rebel Streets: Urban Space, Art and Social Movements.” I co-convened that conference with Gülçin Erdi at CITERES (CIté, TERritoires, Environnement et Sociétés) laboratory at the University of Tours in France. I give my thanks to Dr. Erdi for her collaboration in the organization and funding of the conference and CITERES director Nora Semmoud for her strong support to realize this large international gathering and my exhibition that accompanied it. I would like to thank Muriel Hourlier for her aid in digitalizing this conference and Adeline Vioux for her contribution in designing all the print media. I thank Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH), CITERES and LE STUDIUM Institute for Advanced Studies Val de Loire for the funding of the conference and my postdoctoral research at the University of Tours that both academic organizations stemmed from. I wish to thank the contributors to this book. Most of them I met in the two conferences and a few of them I have had the pressure to get to know through email correspondences. I especially thank them for showing the utmost professionalism during all stages of this book project. I am sure our paths will cross in other academic collaborations and endeavors. I am grateful to Routledge’s Art History and Visual Studies editor Isabella Vitti for approaching me with the publication proposal and for her understanding that has pushed this book forward in the right direction in a record amount of time. I owe thanks to Katie Armstrong for all her help in the administrative and other official matters during the contract and production phases of this volume. I also thank the anonymous peer-reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions that have given me a smoother path to walk on. For the financial support of this project, I thank the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies for their generous research fellowship based on the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SkłodowskaCurie grant agreement No 754513 and The Aarhus University Research Foundation. Finally, I extend sincere gratitude to the late Prof. David L. Craven for being the architect of my academic growth. About the Editor Tijen Tunalı is an academic, artist and curator. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the dialectical relationship of contemporary art and aesthetics to neoliberal globalization. It was supported by various fellowships from the institutions including the Latin American Studies Institute at the University of New Mexico, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Terra Foundation, Tinker Foundation and Phyllis Muth Foundation. Her postdoctoral researches “Art and the City: Urban Space Art and Social Movements” and “Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape” were funded by LE STUDIUM/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship of Val de Loire Institute of Advanced Studies in France and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship in Denmark, respectively. She has curated exhibitions in four continents and actively engaged in art biennials, such as the Bienal de la Habana 2009 and the Istanbul Biennial 2013. Most recently, she curated the exhibition “The Street Art of the Oaxaca Rebellion of 2006” in Pole des Arts Urbains/pOlau, Tours, France in May-June 2018. Tijen is the founder and organizer of “Art and the City: Urban Space, Art and Social Change” –the international conference series featuring the latest work and current thinking of artists, activists and researchers working on the intersection of urban art and resistance. Her writing appeared in many edited volumes and in ASAP Journal, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, and Journal of Visual Art among others. With Prof. Brian Winkenweder, she is currently working on the volume Routledge Companion to Marxist Art History, editing the contributions of 40 Marxist scholars. Contributors Alexandre Grondeau is an assistant professor at Aix-Marseille University. He has a PhD in geography (thesis defended at Parix X Nanterre). He was previously an associate research professor at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-enYvelines. After having been a member of the Laboratory of Urban Geography of Nanterre, then of C3ED, he joined the laboratory TELEMME where he specializes in critical geography, through urban and economic approaches regarding territories of innovation and creativity. His researches notably focus on India, the United States and France. Dr. Grondeau regularly publishes scientific articles in national and international journals. He is the coauthor, with Guy Burgel, of Urban Geography published by Hachette Supérieur. David Todd Lawrence is an associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches African-American literature and culture, folklore studies and cultural studies. Heather Shirey is a professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas. Her teaching and research focus on race and identity, migrations and diasporas, and street art and its communities.Together, Lawrence, Lorah and Shirey direct the Urban Art Mapping research team. Urban Art Mapping is a multidisciplinary, multiracial group of faculty and students from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas. Student researchers include Martin Beck, Tiaryn Daniels, Summer Erickson, Ben Schroeder, Alice Ready, Emma Rinn, Hannah Shogren-Smith and Chioma Uwagwu. The group created and manages two street art archives: the COVID-19 Street Art database (https://covid19streetart.omeka.net) and the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database (https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net). Luke Carroll is a PhD student at the University of York. His PhD thesis “London and the Dreamworld of Gentrification” seeks to explore the role played by desire, fantasy, and aesthetics, in producing gentrification, and gentrifiers, in contemporary London, specifically, along the route of the A10, which stretches from the City of London to Tottenham. He has presented his work at Université Paris Nanterre’s “Political Culture and Political Movements in the Neoliberal City,” “Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neo-Liberal Urban Landscape” for the Association of Art History, and the Political Theory Symposium at the University of York. Luke’s broader research interests include Critical Theory, Commodity Aesthetics, Urban Sociology and the Philosophy of Walter Benjamin. xii Contributors Marie-Pierre Vincent is a former student at the ENS Cachan, an agrégation holder in English, and currently a PhD candidate, in British civilization. She studies antigentrification resistance in Hoxton/Shoreditch in London (2008–2019) at Sorbonne Université (Lettres) and within HDEA research team. After a threeyear doctoral contract at Sorbonne Université when she taught British and American history to students of English, she joined Paris 1/Panthéon-Sorbonne as a teaching assistant in English for management students. She is also the author of an article in a French journal on a comparative case study on the cultural and social diversity between two cultural centers (le Centquatre in Paris and Rich Mix in London). Mathilde Vignau earned her PhD in geography in October 2019 at Aix-Marseille Université and within TELEMME laboratory with the thesis “Towards a Creative Geography: Impacts of Cultural and Creative Places, Activities, and Events on the PACA Region’s Development”. For five years, she was a teaching assistant in geography at Aix-Marseille Université. In August 2020, she joined the ESPI Group in Marseille as an associate professor in geography and urbanism. She is also a researcher at the ESPI2R laboratory. She is focused on urban and economic geography as well as territorial creativity, urban neoliberalism and radical geography. Michelle Veitch is an associate professor in art history at Humanities Department, Mount Royal University, Calgary. She specializes in contemporary Canadian art with a focus on site-specific practices and urbanization. Her research analyzes political aesthetics in public city space borrowing from geography studies and critical art discourse. Veitch has published articles in the journals Topia and International Journal of Canadian Studies and Racar. She has also coauthored publications, including an article for the journal, Fuse and an essay in the book, Global Indigenous Media (Duke University Press). In addition, she has presented conference papers for the Association of Art History (UK), the University Art Association of Canada, the College Art Association (US), the University of Tours (France), and the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. She is currently completing a scholarly book on urban art hotels and bohemian spaces in Canada from the 1980s to the present under contract with McGill Queen’s University Press. Panos Leventis is a professor at the Hammons School of Architecture of Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. He served as Director of the Drury Center in Greece, and taught at the USC Architecture Program in Como, at McGill’s School of Architecture in Montréal, and at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia. Panos has lectured and participated in design reviews at the University of Michigan, the Pratt Institute, the University of New Mexico, the State University of New York at Albany, California State University in San Luis Obispo, Missouri State University, Mid-Sweden University, the University of Patras in Greece, the American College of Greece and the four accredited Schools of Architecture in Cyprus. He has been practicing as a licensed Architect in Cyprus, with built projects and awarded entries in national and international Architectural competitions. Panos’ research engages the past, present and future of Contributors xiii Mediterranean cities. Departing from his dissertation, he authored Twelve Times in Nicosia. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1192–1570: Architecture, Topography and Urban Experience in a Diversified Capital City, published by the Cyprus Research Center. He has since been publishing on the topography of late medieval and renaissance cities in the eastern Mediterranean. Panos has additionally been researching socio-urban upheavals in the context of crisis, focusing on graffiti, street art and urban resistance movements as understood via the lens of public space and participatory urban processes. He has published and lectured on this work in Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Sweden and the United States. Paul Lorah is an associate professor of Geography at the University of St. Thomas. His work focuses on the relationship between conservation, public lands and local economies, landscape analysis, and the geography of street art. Rabea Berfelde is a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London (Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies). In general, her work takes an interdisciplinary approach and draws on critical and political theory to analyze the impact of financialization on everyday life in urban environments. Her PhD “In the Urban Factory. The Reconfiguration of Labour and Urban Space in Berlin” departs from the claim that urban space has been as fundamentally transformed by deindustrialization and neoliberalization, as has the nature of work. Combining fieldwork with philosophical and geographical analysis, she researches the reconfiguration of both labor relations and urban places of production and reproduction in Berlin. She has written and presented work on urban social movements, the financialization of housing, autonomous cultural production, feminist class politics and labor under platform capitalism. Rabea teaches seminars on global cultural politics, biopolitics and feminist critiques of capitalism at universities in both London and Berlin. Rabea is based in Berlin where she is involved in the Right to the city movements. Robin Balliger is an associate professor and chair of “Art, Place, and Public Studies” and Liberal Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. She earned her PhD in anthropology at Stanford University and her research focuses on expressive culture in the context of neoliberal social and spatial transformations. Balliger’s current project is on the City of Oakland, California, particularly on arts, culture and racial politics in the context of urban restructuring. Dr. Balliger previously conducted extensive research in Trinidad on popular music, media expansion and identity formation in national/transnational space. She earned the Textor Award for Outstanding Anthropological Creativity, and she has received fellowships from Fulbright, MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation, Mellon Foundation and Wenner Gren. Her publications appear in The Global Resistance Reader, Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival, and Media Fields Journal, and Race, Poverty, and the Environment. Prior to attending graduate school, Dr. Balliger was a musician and activist in San Francisco. She cofounded Komotion International, a legendary artist collective, gallery and performance space that exemplified the radical politics and creativity of San Francisco’s Mission District. Website: https://robinballiger.com. xiv Contributors Susana Jiménez-Carmona is a graduate in philosophy (UNED, Spain) and has PhD in humanities and culture (Universitat de Girona, Spain). Musician and sound artist, she is a professor of “ethics and aesthetics of art sound” and “social implications of sound art” in the Online Master of Sound Art at the Universitat de Barcelona. She was the promoter and coordinator of El paseo de Jane in Madrid (2010–2016), participatory initiative inspired by Jane Jacobs. Between 2015 and 2019, she was part of Cuidadoras de sonidos—a project of sound art and activism about the city that sounds and that we listen to. She is currently collaborating with the project “Ecrire en commun(s). Arts, écologies transitions” of MUSIDANSE (Paris 8). She has published El paseo de Jane. Tejiendo redes a pie de calle (Madrid: Modernito Books, 2016) and Guía de cómo hacer un paseo de Jane (Madrid: Continta me tienes, 2017). She has collaborated to various books, including such as Musicología en el siglo XXI: nuevos retos, nuevos enfoques (Madrid: SEDEM, 2018), Vacío, sustracción, silencio (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2017), Imaginario al andar (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: TEA, 2017), and El segundo Heidegger: ecología, arte y teología (Madrid: Editorial Dykinson, 2012). She has also published in journals such as SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, Boletín de arte, Sonograma Magazine, Revista Arquitectura (COAM), AusArt Journal for Research, Panambí, revista de investigaciones artísticas, and HUM736 Papeles de cultura contemporánea. Introduction: The Dialectic Role of Art in Late Neoliberal Urbanism Tijen Tunalı Much has been written about how cities are central to the spatial development of neoliberalism, where the macro-politics of globalizing economies make and unmake landscapes and architectures within which the micro-politics of many millions of people’s day-to-day existences are lived out (Harvey 1978, 1990, 2012; Lefebvre 1974, 2000, 2003; Sennett 1994; Tonkiss 2005). A number of researchers have pointed out the contradictory nature of neoliberal urbanism, for instance, how it advocates for the development of innovative urban forms while building suburban enclaves, and how it calls for participatory communities and an egalitarian social vision but, at the same time, redesigns the urban space for elite consumers (Davis 1993; Dicks 2004; Fainstein 2010; Harvey 1989, 2012; Ley 1996; Low and Smith 2006; Smith 1996, 2002; Smyth 1994). Concurrently, urban art has long been discussed for toning down urban anxieties, boosting the economic environment of postindustrial cities, energizing communities and neighborhoods and enforcing policies for new urban planning (Guano 2020; Ley 2003; Mathews 2010; Zukin, 1987, 1995). As a response to this economic, political and aesthetic urban experience, a growing urban resistance and its aesthetic premises have become visible features of urban life. Art in the urban space engages the masses through creativity, originality and beauty and presents alternative forms of sociality. As such, art becomes an arena where the creative individual and community come together in a shared space for a recomposition of the shared sensorium. Yet, art enters the culture of the economy as soon as it establishes this social relation with the public. Therefore, art—as a part of both social and aesthetic power—has been a good resource for local governments to market their respective cities to real-estate investors, to corporate businesses seeking good public relations and to cultural tourists who contribute to the image of the global city. In the cities, attractive corporate-sponsored street art completes the pleasure of freshly brewed latte, while the fusion restaurants and art galleries compete for empty lots. Our senses and sensibilities in our daily life are more and more determined by the urban elite, namely urban planners, designers, policy-makers and technocrats. At present, from barbershops to restaurants, from hotel owners to music club proprietors, the citadins (urban dwellers), who take part in the commercial activities in the city, understand that art is a part of the “coolness” that makes the city an attractive tourist destination and a hotspot for young, middle-class professionals. The political projection of this development is recognized as hegemony over the sensorium of the urban space and thus everyday urban life (Markin 2013). Art has long been discussed as a factor for boosting the economic environment of postindustrial cities (Markusen and Schrock 2006), utilizing and normalizing the 2 Tijen Tunalı neoliberal urban planning (Guinard and Margier 2018; Mathews 2010) and contributing to gentrification and displacement (Cameron and Coaffee, 2005; Ley 2003; Rich 2019; Zukin, 1987, 1996). On the other hand, a number of research related to the social role of art emphasizes the therapeutic, unitary or reconciliatory attributes of art—arguing about art’s role to ease tensions between communities and city authorities (Bishop 2012; Burton, Jackson and Willsdon 2016). Nevertheless, such perspectives often do not take into account the multifaceted relationships of art to neoliberal urbanization as well as visible, corporal and embodied aesthetic experience in the urban space. The result is the marginalization of art’s role in the radical creation of common and shared spaces for socialization, mobilization and political action in the cities. In the wake of massive urban movements, uprisings and revolts targeting neoliberalism all around the world, there has been a growing interest to understand the social contextualization of art in the urban public realm. Currently, there is a pressing need to challenge the dominant arguments that reduce the complex and contradictory role of art to a straightforward phenomenon in a continuously evolving neoliberal urban landscape. The major contribution that this book intends to make is shifting the focus from both the utopian and dystopian visions of neoliberal urbanism and the malevolent and passive role of art in it to a view that recognizes art’s capacities of resistance agonism, contestation and re-appropriation in the urban space. In tandem with the neoliberal critique, there are compelling intellectual, social as well as artistic movements eager to reclaim equal access to urban space and resources for all urban inhabitants. The urban struggle based on the “right to the city,” democratic political participation and resistance to neoliberalism have evolved from claiming and redefining substantive rights of citizens to reproducing and re-appropriating the urban space and empowering dissenters as city dwellers (Harvey 2012; Irazábal 2008; Mayer 2009; Merrifield 2014; Purcell 2004). The city’s parks, streets and squares have been the central platforms for elevating these struggles in both the political and aesthetic realm. Notably, art in the rebel streets has performed in both the political constellations of local struggles and the grassroots politics of the urban social movements. For example, street art played an essential role during the Egyptian and Tunisian revolution (Abaza 2016), Spanish Indignados (RamírezBlanco 2018), Greek Aganaktismenoi movement (Tsilimpoudini 2016) and the Gezi Uprising (Tunalı 2018). Recently, the Black Lives Matter Movement leaves its mark in the urban space with street murals across the United States. Inspired by the urban social movements and other urban struggles emerging from the continuing politico-aesthetic urgencies, this book aspires to show that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city not only allows for a hegemonic restructuring of the urban environment but also facilitates the growth of counter-hegemonic aesthetic resistance. Regarding gentrification as a continuing and evolving process of neoliberal urban planning, the authors discuss the complexities of aesthetic disposition in the gentrified urban environment by analyzing the relations of art to both cultural capital and bottom-up resistance in the city. The specific aim of the book is twofold: (1) to rethink the changing and dialectic roles of art and artists in urbanism that put the interests of capital over the interests of ordinary inhabitants; (2) to reveal the potential of urban aesthetics in the formation of the agonistic public experience that Introduction 3 heralds a democratic political culture in the urban space. We seek to elaborate an intersectional framework that examines “the right to the city” while offering a theoretical and visual analysis of the aesthetic formations that are positive resources for political culture to become visible and channel subjective dynamics into political participation and empowerment. Weaving together extensive social science findings—in urban sociology, human geography and cultural anthropology—with art research and theory, we hope to contribute to the analysis of gentrification in neoliberal urbanism from the perspective of artistic resistance. We do that with regard to the critique of neoliberalism, the urban agenda of neoliberal policy elites and widening class inequality in the cities. Neoliberalism had its heyday from 1989 until 2008, when the global economic crisis began with Wall Street’s fourth-largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers, was going bankrupt. The core of neoliberal philosophy involves liberating private enterprises from any restrictions and regulations imposed by states, and it has a pronounced preference for economic freedom over political freedom (Friedman and Rose 1980, 21). In the first instance, neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. Postwar economic developments witnessed the rise of the welfare state, with the distribution of state wealth across education, health and social security funds, but the neoliberal policies of the 1980s shrunk those funds in favor of new markets and international treaties. The state in the neoliberal system consists of the military, defense, police and legal structures and secures private property rights and guarantees—by force if need be—the proper functioning of markets. This ensures the quality and integrity of capital and not the citizens (Harvey 2006, 2). Infamously, David Harvey, as well as many other neo-Marxist scholars, have argued that neoliberalism arose to restore class power—the power that was threatened by the collapse of the Keynesian approach to managing capitalist accumulation based on social democratic systems and the Bretton Woods system, which had regulated international relations (Harvey 2005, 11–25). Neoliberal policies lead to the predominance of competition as a way of managing urban and rural spaces—in contrast to the principles of redistribution that were upheld in earlier eras—eras resulting in the transfer of many functions that were previously in the hands of the state to nonstate and quasi-state bodies—such as corporations and nongovernmental organizations—to respond to the needs of the citadins (Fawaz 2009). This new “liberal” regime of political-economic governance has enveloped cities in an ever-growing market-dominated power. Especially large cities have become increasingly important laboratories for a variety of neoliberal urban policy experiments and neoliberal urbanization has involved the creation of common spaces that guarantee the conditions for the production and reproduction of free-flowing capital. Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom (1962), criticized twentieth-century liberals for betraying freedom by viewing welfare and equality as either prerequisites for or alternatives to freedom (Friedman 1962). In The Road to Serfdom, published first in 1944, Friedman’s mentor Friedrich Hayek admonishes that government interventions and restrictions on the markets would lead to the loss of freedom in economic as well as political life, and therefore the state should concentrate only on tasks that create safety nets for neoliberal markets (Hayek 1994, 42–45). For Hayek, market freedom is essential for the capitalist market to expand 4 Tijen Tunalı endlessly: “Parties in the market should be free to buy and sell at any price, so long as they can find a partner to the transaction—free to produce, buy and sell anything that can be produced or sold at all” (Hayek 1994, 42). As much as this concept of freedom sounds like individual autonomy and self-determination, it refers only to the consumer’s buying capacity. As long as the consumer has enough money to make purchases, they can engage in any sort of “free” transaction. In his book Unequal Freedoms, John McMurtry notes: This measure of consumer freedom entails an unlimited inequality of freedom. The more money one has, the more freedom one is entitled to, from none at all to limitless rights to consume. This is the ground of individual freedom of citizens with its strong claims of equality of opportunity for all the same time. These contradictions do not detain market believers, for they know that the market confers on them the unlimited freedom to choose, to have, and to enjoy consumer goods the more money they have. (McMurtry 1998, 166–167) In this value system, our rights to partake in society depend on having “more” economic power that grants us the right to “freely” partake in the market system as consumers. The key here is the technique of transfer from citizen to consumer. What this concept of freedom does is to make individuals and communities subservient to their commodity value. In neoliberal logic, “free” societies should be exposed to political processes as little as possible and much is to be left to the “free” market, where individuals “freely” partake. With that, democratic life altogether changes its meaning. David Harvey is renowned for his work to establish neoliberalism as a system of deceit. His work redirects our perspective to recognize what appears to be about “freedom” is, in fact, “anti-democratic,” and what seems to be promoting equality instead restores and entrenches class power (Harvey 2006, 157–158). For example, what Harvey refers to as “conservative political reforms” is the shift from democratic society to a new type of neoliberal society, where the rulers reinforce counter-revolution through war and fascist repression, dead-end reformism of elections and control of grassroots action and civil society with the force of corporate initiatives (Harvey 2005, 47). In the same vein, Dag Einar Thorsen and Amund Lie observe that: … if the democratic process slows down neoliberal reforms or threatens individual and commercial liberty, which it sometimes does, then democracy ought to be sidestepped and replaced by the rule of experts or legal instruments designed for that purpose. The practical implementation of neoliberal policies will, therefore, lead to a relocation of power from political to economic processes, from the state to markets and individuals, and finally from the legislature and executives’ authorities to the judiciary. (Thorsen Dag and Lie 2009) Many scholars from a myriad of disciplines have underscored that neoliberalism not only fabricates the system of free trade agreements, finance market speculations, privatization and economic reforms but also constructs a new type of society with a new value system based on the principles of the market. Harvey, in his book Brief History of Neoliberalism, strongly argues that with the establishment of neoliberal Introduction 5 market principles, we have moved away from a society marked by democratic governance to a new type of society in which the conditions for politics have been curtailed severely because of the conservative political reforms informed by neoliberal thought and theories (Harvey 2005, 47). Belgian psychologist Paul Verhaeghe draws significant connections between neoliberalism and psychosis and shows how the selfinterest incubated in such a society, claimed by neoliberalists to encourage innovation, simply serves to damage morality and reward psychopathy (Verhaeghe 2014). Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman succinctly summarizes the paradox of freedom in contemporary society: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless” (Bauman 1988, 32). Bauman’s statement underlines that we are free to question religion, our society, our government, etc. because this kind of freedom is, indeed, prompted by indifference. In this new “liberal” environment, urban governance has been characterized by redevelopment, urban expansion and real estate speculation. The implications of these changes in the urban space have had exclusionary outcomes such as the privatization of public spaces and changes in urban policy that systematically neglect the needs of low-income residents. However, this is not to suggest that neoliberal urban development is happening evenly everywhere. As Lisa Lowe contends: “capitalism expands not through rendering all labor, resources, and markets across the world identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial divisions, identifying particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations for exploitation and still others for disposal” (Lowe 2015, 150). Neoliberal urban planning arguably divides the cities into functional parcels that are associated with the different purposes essential for maintaining the capitalist and colonial divide in terms of ethnic segregation, domestic reproduction, labor division and accumulation of capital (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Smith 2002). Local residents, who have grown up in the areas chosen for urban development, are displaced due to rising rental prices, high costs of nearby facilities and an overall sense of being unwelcome. Class privileges play a central role in the neoliberal spatial restructuring that intensifies class and ethnic divides, which are reinforced through the intensive movement of capital. For Brenner and Theodore, the neoliberal urban reforms paved the way for the dialectically intertwined urban expansion that they termed “creative destruction”: … the (partial) destruction of extant institutional arrangements and political compromises through market-oriented reform initiatives and the (tendential) creation of a new infrastructure for market-oriented economic growth, commodification and the rule of capital (emphasis by authors). (Brenner and Theodore 2002, 362) In other words, as neoliberal entities, the creative industries—while being “creative”—are also “destructive.” The creative industries are part of the application of neoliberal hegemony to arts and cultural policy, and as such, they cannot but reproduce and endorse the exploitation and inequalities inherent in neoliberalism (Hesmondhalgh 2008, 567). As Mike Davis has argued, “the middle class has finally come downtown but only to bring suburbia with them. The hipsters think they’re living in the real thing, but this is purely faux urbanism, a residential mall” (Davis 2016). Richard Florida’s popular work The Rise of the Creative Class explains how Introduction 7 relations that operate through, and are intertwined with, the reproduction of capitalism in the settler landscape (Blomley 2004). The heated analytical and political debates about gentrification and urban change, that continue for almost 40 years, have often focused on the deepening class polarization of urban housing markets, with much less attention paid to the increasingly sophisticated and creative array of methods used to resist gentrification. Even less attention has been paid to the role and political potential of art in urban resistance and spatial justice movements. Since the 1980s, most social science research on art and gentrification has concentrated on the integration of art into the market-oriented urban policy and new urban planning to help boost the economic environment of post-industrial cities, energize communities and neighborhoods and raise real estate value. When sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term “gentrification” in 1964, there was no discussion about artists driving up real estate values in the United States (Glass 1964). Glass observed that in inner London, “One by one, many of the working-class quarters have been invaded by the middle class–upper and lower … Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed” (Glass 1964, xvii). In 1979, Neil Smith contested this understanding of gentrification and discussed that it is rather about the movement of capital, not people. He regarded gentrification as the return of capital to these areas that are productive for economic development. With his “rent gap” theory, Smith also showed that there are many agents involved in gentrification, he wrote: “to explain gentrification according to the gentrifier’s actions alone while ignoring the role of builders, developers, landlords, mortgage lenders, government agencies, real estate agents and tenants is excessively narrow” (Smith 1979, 540). For Smith, the rent gap occurs between the capitalized ground rent and the potential ground rent in depreciated areas. He writes, “Gentrification occurs when the gap is wide enough that developers can purchase shells cheaply, can pay the builders’ costs and profit for rehabilitation, can pay interest on mortgage and construction loans, and can then sell the end product for a sale price that leaves a satisfactory return to the developer” (Smith 1979, 545). His thesis solidified the argument that “The so-called urban renaissance has been stimulated more by economic than cultural forces”(Smith 1979, 540). However, soon after in the early 1980s, studies emerged that linked gentrification to the art establishments and artists. Sharon Zukin, in Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, published in 1980, found that most manufacturers would have stayed in SoHo were it not for the law tweaks that allowed artists to create workspaces and the tax breaks that incentivized the conversion of industrial spaces into residential ones (Zukin 1987). Four years later, in a highly influential article titled “The Fine Art of Gentrification,” Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan discussed how, in New York City, when the art world moved into the Lower East Side, filled the freshly emptied apartments and cleaned up the area, it began to transform into a hip and expensive neighborhood (Deutsche and Ryan 1984). Since then many studies followed this argument and established a discourse on art and artists’ role as facilitators of gentrification (Cole 1987; Ley 2003; Mathews 2010; Rich 2019). A milestone in unraveling 8 Tijen Tunalı the potential role of artists fueling gentrification was identifying them as “bridge gentrifiers” (Zukin 1995, 111). The term attempts to communicate the lack of artists’ own actively intentional agency in facilitating gentrification. After the millennium, this role has served as the most persistent argument, although some alternative media on the internet continued to label the artists as gentrifiers. A stage-model type representation influences more recent research, which recognizes that artists are used by governmental interventionist schemes to promote gentrification (Hackworth and Smith 2001). Other social science research has recognized a second-stage model, where capital follows the artists into gentrified neighborhoods to commodify their cultural assets. Another model shows that gentrified environments lead to growth in the arts (Casellas, Dot and Pallares-Barbera 2012). Some of the later accounts chronicle artists not as facilitators of gentrification but as displaces themselves (Lefebvre 2003). Finally, the most recent study in the Urban Studies journal contests the artists’ role as facilitators of gentrification and argues instead that artists and the art establishment are drawn to already gentrified or gentrifying neighborhoods (Foster, Grodach and Murdoch 2018). There is a growing number of artists joining the anti-gentrification resistance everywhere, but it is especially noticeable in large cities like New York, Berlin, London, Barcelona, Istanbul and Delhi, which have been severely hit by the negative effects of gentrification. Arguably, the gentrified neighborhoods are suitable for art to test its role in the urban space, which, on the one hand, reduces citizens to consumers and, on the other hand, facilitates different social coexistences, autonomous networks, self-organized mobilizations and empowered communities. How do art and artists partake in the processes of gentrification and displacement? How does art resist gentrification rather than “mask the violence of displacement” (Gittlitz 2015)? What could be effective ways for artists to deal with their complicity in the production and marketing of the city? How could artistic expressions in the urban space reveal, delimit, question and resist the complexity of the urban crisis? What kind of political and aesthetic possibilities could emerge in the intersection of the spatial and dialogical premises of art and the ideological and economic premise of new urban planning? What kind of visual analysis method could be applied to discuss the visual impact of the commercial, artistic, political and visual language of the gentrified neighborhoods? The chapters in this book fulfill the need to reconceive innovatively, creatively and scientifically of gentrified neighborhoods not only as arenas for urban politics but also for aesthetic dispositive against those politics. They highlight the need for collaborative action to voice the unarticulated aspects of gentrification and challenge the forced displacement of already marginalized groups. The loss of public spaces, the exclusion of neighborhood residents from planning decisions and the forced relocation of poorer residents due to rising rent and rundown buildings are not the only social issues of gentrification and displacement. Neoliberal urban planning continues to divide cities into functional parcels that are associated with the different purposes essential for maintaining the system in terms of ethnic segregation, domestic reproduction, labor division and accumulation of capital. Such strategic principles of urban organization, structures and symbolic economies are made up of communicative signs and symbols reproducing the dominant socio-political premises and preferable images of the city (Nas 2011). Jacques Rancière’s theory of “distribution of the sensible” explains the ordering of sensuous production as the aesthetic regime that creates the conditions to perceive, Introduction 9 think and act in a given socio-historical situation. For Rancière, aesthetics is a means of collectivism that forges the entire sensorium of a community by producing a world of audible, visible, exchangeable, communicable, transformable objects, things and experiences. In the configuration of that common social world, “the police (order)” organizes and commands the distribution of space and time, occupations and capacities as a way to create consensus and social hierarchies that make up our perceived social realities (Rancière 2010). Rancière calls this the “distribution of the sensible,” and it is in the sensory fabric of the urban space; politics is aesthetics (Rancière 2004). Neoliberalism, as a hegemonic politico-economic process, has also become a hegemonic consensus that has altered how we act and think about everything, everywhere. For Harvey, it is the new common sense “taken for granted and beyond question” (Harvey 2006, 145–146). Subversive aesthetic experience can affect the rational perception of social practices and norms and make us aware of the obscured conditions and modalities of the social order (Armstrong 2000; Rancière 2004, 2010). On this account, aesthetics also has the capacity to be an irresolvable force of disruption to the existing politico-aesthetic order. Art, as the arena of human creativity, imagination and sensibility can propose, show and enact ways of being and acting as political subjects by the way of such aesthetic properties. For Rancière, such politicization of ordinary citizens and their reclamation of the political space of visibility and speech belonging to them paves the way for true democratic representation and revolutionary politics. Another Francophone philosopher Chantal Mouffe writes on the instrumentalization of art by the contemporary hegemonic forces: “The aesthetic strategies of the counterculture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical exigency are now used in order to promote the conditions required by the current mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period” (Mouffe 2005). Her work on the democratic public spaces contends: “What is urgently needed is to foster the multiplication of agonistic public spaces where everything that the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate can be brought to light and challenged” (Mouffe 2005). Mouffe’s position about the role of art in the urban space is close to that of Rancière. She recognizes art’s capacity to form and reform democratic communities. She argues that “cultural and artistic practices could play an important role in the agonistic struggle because they are a privileged terrain for the construction of new subjectivities” (Mouffe 2005). Mouffe and Rancière ascribe to art a unique potential to instigate a disruption in the existing sensory and discursive regime and to contest the emergence of hegemonic consensus. The contributors in this book test the hypothesis that the use of space or spatial forms and sense-making by inhabitants could change as a result of the dialectical relation between the imposed spatial order and creative spatial practices that connect places and people. This volume presents many examples of art practices that fuse visual representation with direct action against gentrification in attempts to contest the imposed value order of neoliberal urbanism. The contributors extend the discussion of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey by purporting that art engagements have been proliferating to aid “the dispossessed to take back control of the city from which they have for so long been excluded” (Harvey 1978). Urban space is a locus of social and political resistance for “the right to the city”—a concept for urban struggles coined by Lefebvre at the time of Parisian uprisings in 1968 (Lefebvre 1968). The urban environment has always been considered a physical expression of social relations, 10 Tijen Tunalı movements, and ideologies (Fainstein 2010; Harvey 1989). Therefore, changes to it provide some insight into broader political reforms that could produce and reproduce everyday urban life. Lefebvre considered the urban space a loaded ideological landscape that is socially produced (Lefebvre 1974). However, as Lefebvre’s descriptions of space as a social product infer, the citadins are also producers and activators of the urban space. To exercise the right to the city is to play an active role in shaping urbanism and urban life (Lefebvre 1968). In Lefebvre’s discussions, cities are increasingly shaped by global economic competition, local residents struggle to create and protect spaces of heterotopia (Lefebvre 1968). Harvey, in Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, explains this heterotopia: Lefebvre’s concept of heterotopia (radically different from that of Foucault) delineates liminal social spaces of possibility where “something different” is not only possibility, but foundational for the defining of revolutionary trajectories. This “something different” does not necessarily arise out of a conscious plan, but more simply out of what people do, feel, sense and come to articulate as they seek meaning in their daily lives. Such practices create heterotopic spaces all over the place. We do not have to wait upon the grand revolution to constitute such spaces. (Harvey 2012, xvii) The right to the city, then, is the right to reconstitute spaces of social and cultural reproduction in the city and is linked to struggles against neoliberal urbanism with reference to claims of the right to housing, education, health, culture, inclusion, participation and so forth. This “cry and demand” for the city, in the words of Marcuse, “is for the material necessities of life, the aspiration is for a broader right to what is necessary beyond the material to lead a satisfying life” (Marcuse 2012, 31). Harvey notes that “our political task, Lefebvre suggests, is to imagine and reconstitute a totally different kind of city out of the disgusting mess of a globalizing, urbanizing capital run amok” (Harvey 2012, xvi). Many contemporary studies on the link between urbanism and neoliberalism have followed Lefebvre’s vision of “right to the city” from radical viewpoints. For example, shouldering Lefebvre’s legacy, Edward Soja views neoliberal urban policies as the spatialization of neoliberalism with mounting social and spatial injustices (Soja 1996, 2010). His spatial critique and conceptualization of “spatial justice” solidifies the discussions that while capitalism commodifies spaces of daily life, it is confronted with constant dissidence outside the institutional political channels in everyday urban spaces. Harvey stresses that, at the heart of the spatial justice and other urban struggles, there is one collective aim: “their right to change the world, to change life and to reinvent the city more after their heart’s desire” (Harvey 2003, 25). The social consciousness of such a right is connected to the desire for self-determination in daily social relations in the city. It is thus plausible to state that such desire mobilizes people in the urban spaces because it corroborates the common right for the urban public space and the right to decide how to use that public space commonly. Desire to have power over the daily life in a city is an emancipating desire, hence often against immense efforts by the neoliberal reproduction of desire. The urban sensory environments must be seductive and pleasant so that the desire for consumption can be encouraged. The book opens with Luke Caroll’s chapter in Introduction 11 which urban space is regarded as a setting for capitalist desires and life experiences. Drawing from critical theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxist theories of aesthetics, Caroll offers insights into an overlooked question inspired by the Frankfurt School, especially Walter Benjamin. He suggests that the aesthetics of the gentrified spaces and the “desirable” aesthetic sensibilities of gentrifiers are indicative of the form taken by alienation under contemporary capitalism. This theory provides insight into how gentrification is connected to a certain capitalist “desire” and its contemporary urban aesthetics. Caroll’s theorization of capitalist desire and gentrification offers a qualified framework and vocabulary to the discussions, especially generated by the discussions of the production of space disguising the social relations contained in common spaces. By highlighting the centrality of desire to gentrification, Caroll’s chapter creatively ignites discussions on the capitalist fetishization of the urban space and inspires new ways to combat gentrification through the reconstitution of desire rather than moralistic critique. The first part of the book continues with the discussion of how the neoliberal aestheticization of urban space both conceals and reveals important cultural contradictions in the neoliberal city. The following two case studies in Oakland and Marseille discuss the neoliberal motivations for using aesthetics as a strategy toward social exclusion and the management of the class and other social identities at the expense of growing cultural reification. Robin Balliger’s chapter analyzes the characterization of artists as “pioneer gentrifiers” in the gentrification literature through longitudinal ethnographic research, particularly by shifting the debate from the artist as a signifier to the embodied individual with neighborhood relationships that span many years. Balliger contrasts the everyday lives of artists in a neighborhood with arts-led revitalization strategies in Oakland’s Uptown District—one of the most extensive urban “restorations” in Californian history. Her research is especially significant in showing how the myopic discourse on artists as gentrifiers damages solidarity among artists and other low-income populations. Since the end of the 1990s, a number of the urban elite has been using creativity as a new urban planning tool to rehabilitate some disadvantaged neighborhoods. For a decade, Marseille, the second-largest city in France, has been redesigned radically and the connections between arts, culture and neoliberalism are increasingly visible. According to Mathilde Vignau and Alexandre Grondeau, two main tendencies exist the reinforcement of gentrification and urban neoliberalism through arts and culture and the permanence of creative resistance movements opposed to the drift of capitalism. Vignau and Grondeau’s long-lasting research project focuses on four distinctive neighborhoods located close to the city center of Marseille—places where arts and culture have been used to quickly transform city landscapes or functions since the city gained the European Capital of Culture label. The researchers discuss how in Marseille, and more particularly in La Joliette and Le Vieux-Port, the aesthetic dimension of art, culture and creativity has radically redefined the city center landscape and how that change occurs vis-à-vis neoliberalism. Vignau and Grondeau then analyze the antigentrification resistance movements in the form of graffiti, stickers, hip-hop music and alternative movies. They discuss that, especially the case of La Plaine neighborhood shows how those initiatives can serve sociopolitical protests engaged in by users and artists who fear the potential gentrification of the whole neighborhood. The new forms of agency and strategy of urban creativity in the form of graffiti, wall paintings, yarn bombings, stickers, urban gardening, street performances, tactical art, 12 Tijen Tunalı creative campaigns and theatrical actions—among others—demand active spectatorship and have a growing power to renegotiate space toward new forms of political participation. The second chapter highlights the diverse voices of the artists and tactics of resistance to the process of gentrification. Susana Jimenez Carmona analyzes the work of Ultra-Red, a recognized group of sound artists and activists with more than 20 members spread out between Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and the UK. The group understands listening as a political action that always implies a relationship with others and with the environment. Since 1997, they have collaborated with the community members in Union de Vecinos during the mobilizations of Pico Also to defend social housing and confront the problem of gentrification. This example provides a critical approach to Ultra-Red’s controversy and the positions of the different parties involved in complicated relations between art and gentrification at present (Ultra-red, art galleries, some art critics and neighborhood associations). Marie Pierre Vincent’s case regards Ridley Road market, a daily retail market famous for its fusion of Afro-Caribbean, Asian and European goods, which has recently been severely altered by gentrification. Vincent analyzes two separate artistic projects documenting the market and the resistance to gentrification: Lucinda Rogers’ past exhibition of paintings, On Gentrification, displayed at the House of Illustration gallery (King’s Cross) and Donna Travis’ photographic work in progress, Dalston Stories, to be displayed this year in two separate galleries (a local gallery and a trendy one in gentrified Shoreditch). By analyzing the diversity of the artistic creations (ranging from visual to textual productions) and the impact of these works (through semi-structured interviews), Vincent examines the extent to which a new form of covert and disguised activism is produced. She further addresses the role and limitations of these white, middle-class, female artists using art both as a tool for reflection and a catalyst for resistance. Rabea Berfelde’s chapter examines the occupation of Berlin’s Volksbühne—a public theater with a history of radical cultural production—to consider the “right to the creative city” in times marked by the increasing financialization of the economy and its intimate link to urban real-estate speculation. Berfelde revisits the critique of the “creative city” paradigm that has been thriving in human geography debates over the last years. Her case study about Volksbühne’s occupation by the artists’ collective from Dust to Glitter demonstrates the contestations between “culturalization from below” through city dwellers and autonomous cultural scenes and “culturalization from above” through governmental bodies. Berfelde contributes to the discussion of the creative reproduction of urban space by arguing that the form of “communing” the artist-activists practiced during the occupation indicated an alternative understanding of the creative production of urban space. From an urban planning perspective, the capacity to involve diverse groups in participatory planning processes is useful to foster integration and consensus on public goals. Therefore, the integration of public, private, and civic actors in the process of community building is highly desirable for urban planners trying to advocate the effectiveness of policies and projects. However, there is also the other side of the coin: more and more urban communities and neighborhood organizations enact active resistance against gentrification. The neoliberal restructuring also results in a new social and urban order through which urban inhabitants reimagine and reinvent their role. This provides fertile ground to produce new subjectivities both integrating and resisting the ideas of the neoliberal city. The third part of the book Introduction 13 delves into the discussion of active citizenship and neighborhood resistance shaped by the complexities of people’s lives, needs and desires, creating times and “spaces of collective lives.” The interdisciplinary team at the University of St. Thomas, led by art history professors Todd Lawrence, Paul Lorah and Heather Shirey, combine insights from art history, ethnographic research and spatial analysis, examining the potential of street art to activate community identity, and of sanctioned and unsanctioned art as a response to gentrification in the Midway neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota. The researchers show that recent economic development in an affordable area of working-class homes has instigated a greater instability in this neighborhood with growing racial and ethnic diversity. They discuss how, since the beginnings of gentrification, the Midway neighborhood has become a key site for counterhegemonic artistic expression and resistance. Gentrification is often discussed as a form of new-age colonialization both in academic and activist circles. For Liza Kim Jackson, gentrification is a strategy of the ongoing colonial relations—both symbolic and material—that gives rise to the settler city and persists as a method of disciplining the poor and indigenous bodies, spaces and lands through the capitalist way of life (Jackson 2017). Such discussions are valuable as they lead to broader political questions about socio-environmental and cultural life in the cities. Most gentrification theory has addressed the how, why and who of gentrification, but often ignored the indigenous production of public and cultural space. Michelle Veitch’s chapter focuses on the indigenous art Hotel Skwachàys Lodge on the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, Canada. She discusses how the relocation schemes further promote frontier and colonial discourses by establishing East Hastings, an economically depressed city district facing pressures of cultural urban redevelopment. Veitch shows that the artists Fred and Whitehead respatialize and re-historicize the hotel with their images and texts that incorporate heraldic crest art, oral traditions and ceremonial practices to decolonize such discourses. Integrating murals, poetic writings and woodcarvings into their room designs at Skwachàys Lodge, Veitch discusses how the artists engage in aesthetic resistance by redressing trans-indigenous cultural inheritances, ancestral genealogies, knowledge systems and clan lineages. The book concludes by conceptualizing gentrified neighborhoods not only as arenas for urban politics but also as settings for aesthetic resistance against those politics. Panos Leventis engages in one such story in the work of Astraki Strikes, a street artist working in the heart of Nicosia by analyzing her ongoing project “Mapping the Old City,” which has engaged an entire district of the Walled City of Cyprus since 2014. Leventis interprets this project as a community-building agent, one that resists the dominant socio-urban forces of redevelopment and instead showcases, celebrates and empowers unseen urban heroes of Nicosia—those who have stayed loyal to the city through decades of conflict and reconciliation, abandonment and social re-engagement. This book points to major shifts in our understanding of urban transformation in the changing neoliberal landscape and the role of art in it. Considering art as a crucial tool for new and agonistic forms of political engagement in the gentrified urban space is a novel critical approach to both the aesthetics of politics and urban space theory. 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